Not at all gold: Michael Richards discovers ethnic slurs actually remain shocking when used seriously

When a friend emailed me a little while ago telling me there was video of a bizarre, racist Michael “Kramer” Richards rant from a comedy show over the weekend, I assumed I’d either be train-wreck fascinated or Borat-style anti-Semitism amused. But the actual video — Richards has some kind of freaky meltdown after being very gently heckled and starts calling black audience members “niggers” — is really upsetting, not least of all when Richards lamely tries to pass the whole thing off as some kind of social commentary (“You see, there’s still those words, those words, those words”) before walking pathetically off the stage.

Defamer (for you sports aficionados, that’s Deadspin for Hollywood) reports that Jerry himself is the first Seinfeld castmember to express regret about the whole incident. Whatever; the video is going to make it hard for Richards to pass this off as some kind of joke. (That video should also make Mel Gibson damn thankful that the cops don’t have — or haven’t released — footage of his anti-Jew rant; if that was out there for public consumption a lot more folks than just Ari “I’m Rahm’s brother” Emmanuel would be calling for a boycott.) It’s a good thing he didn’t have any kind of career after Seinfeld; if he did, it’d be over now.